Advertisement

Advertisement

Unravelling taste genes could help us eat healthily

By Catherine de Lange

It’s hard to ignore our taste genes

(Image: Plainpicture/fStop)

Could your ideal diet be written in your genes? That’s the promise of nutrigenomics, which looks for genetic differences in the way people’s bodies process food so that diets can be tailored accordingly.

The field had a rocky start after companies overhyped its potential, but with advances in genetic sequencing, and a slew of new studies, the concept is in for a reboot.

Last week, Nicola Pirastu at the University of Trieste, Italy, and his colleagues told the European Society of Human Genetics meeting in Milan that diets tailored to genes that are related to metabolism can help people lose weight. The team used the results of a genetic test to design specific diets for 100 obese people that also provided them with 600 fewer calories than usual. A control group was placed on a 600-calorie deficit, untailored diet.

Advertisement

After two years, both groups had lost weight, but those in the nutrigenetic group lost 33 per cent more. They also took only a year to lose as much weight as the group on the untailored diet lost in two years.

If this is shown to work in bigger, randomised trials, it would be fantastic, says Ana Valdes, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Some preliminary information will soon be available from Europe’s Food4Me project. It is a study of 1200 people across several countries who were given either standard nutrition advice, or a similarly genetically tailored diet. “It’s testing whether we can get bigger changes in diet using a personalised approach, and part of that is using genetic information,” says team member John Mathers, director of the Human Nutrition Research Centre at Newcastle University, UK.

Catering for fussy eaters

Critics of nutrigenetics say we should just eat healthily regardless of our genes, but Mathers says the effects of even a healthy diet can vary according to someone’s genetics. For instance, the APOE gene is linked to the breakdown of fat, and one variant of it confers a higher risk of getting cardiovascular disease and dementia. “People with that variant respond differently to certain fats in the diet,” he says. Another gene affects how much vitamin B9 people need.

Mathers thinks there is potential to boost health with tailored diets, especially with the more accurate genetic sequencing now available. But just having the information doesn’t tell us what to do with it, he says. “The challenge is working that out, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Genetic research could also enable fussy eaters to get all the nutrients they need by finding the genes that affect taste preference.

Pirastu’s team has found 17 genes that seem to be associated with liking specific foods such as broccoli, bacon, coffee and white wine. The team is trying to untangle which compounds in the food cause the effect.

The hope is that this kind of work should eventually allow for the design of foods, or cooking methods, tailored to people’s preferences that make healthier foods more appetising. For example, if people don’t like spinach, you could mask the compound they dislike by cooking it in a certain way or adding a supplement, Pirastu says. This could be beneficial for people who dislike whole food groups, he adds.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Unravel epicurean genes to let us all eat healthily”